Every domain property has a value these days; despite the numerous automated evaluation services, there is little agreement on how domainers evaluate domain names – especially generics.
Take for example the domain name Banana.com – owned by the Castello Brothers.
Banana is a nutritious fruit, liked by many people around the world. In the tropics, it’s often a symbol of national heritage and nature. Its shape and color are very distinct.
Banana.com certificate from Valuate.com: $450
It comes as a shocker, however, that Valuate.com returns a very low appraisal for the domain name Banana.com. One would expect that a BIG number would match the size of this keyword, however the number is shockingly small: $450 buckaroos.
Meanwhile, Bananarama.com is appraised at a whopping $17,000. Hello???
Surely something’s odd with the evaluation algorithm.
Good find, why lie, if you do a bad slicing of the domain then the metrics you get have absolutely no sense!
Estibot.com that powers Valuate.com use dictionnaries to try to identify the domains terms and do the best possible slicing. What is good with this method is it fast, but sometimes (rarely) that may lead to slicing that are not the best ones.
When you want to do bulk appraisals in real-time it’s the most efficient method.
Now I am sure that checking for any appraisal if the term frequency/search popularity of the whole term is higher than the one found thanks to the slicing algorythm should be sufficient to fix this bug.
I just sent a note to the Estibot people about this post.
Today they are providing without doubt the BEST automated valuation service, stil not perfect but this is why they continue to work hard everyday fixing bugs and improving it.
Rome has not been built in one day!
Francois
PS: I manually fixed the good slice at Estibot.com for this term… and this change all.
Anyone can change the parsing of any word on estibot.com, and that affects appraisals on all services that rely on it (including valuate).
We parse one word domains perfectly, but I guess someone thought it was a good idea to change it to “ba na na” which is what you’re seeing above. We let users override parsing because generally they’re correct, but this is obviously a case where the original parsing was right.
Thanks for bringing it to our attention,
Luc L.
I’ll start the bidding at $450 for that domain name, but the offer is time sensitive ok lol
“It comes as a shocker, however, that Valuate.com returns a very low appraisal for the domain name Banana.com.”
Lucius,
If you’re being serious, the reason for the low valuation is Valuate is not appraising Banana
but Ba Na Na.
Valuate uses Estibot engine.
Estibot allows you to change the keyword parsing if you think it’s wrong. For whatever reason,
Valuate does not have that feature from what I can see.
Supposedly if you change the keyword parsing at Estibot then Valuate will pick it up.
I used Estibot to appraise Banana.com and got an appraisal of $1,910,000 USD.
Big difference frrom $450 USD.
I just checked and Valuate now also returns an appraisal of $1,910,000 USD with the
keyword properly presented as one word.
From Estibot:
Domain Details:
Domain: banana.com
Keywords: banana
–
Appraisal Overview:
EstiBot Value: $1,910,000 USD
whew, you had me worried for a second. I was more suprised when I valuated Tangerine.com. I had a Tangerine Dream many years ago that IT would be worth millions some day. I am still waiting.
I wonder how much aPPle.com is worth? 🙂
Domain Sales – No sniping now!
Tric – The valuation was changed, the previous valuation is depicted in the screen capture above (good job, Francois) 😉
Michael & David – Your investment seems to have been restored 😀
“Tric – The valuation was changed, the previous valuation is depicted in the screen capture above (good job, Francois)”
Lucius,
The valuation wasn’t changed. The keyword parsing was.
That’s what I was trying to relate to you.
The change from ba na na to banana is why the appraisal changed.
If you look at your own screen capture, you can clearly see that the keyword used
for the valuation is: ba na na.
if you evaluate it again , you will see that the keyword used
for the valuation is now: banana.
I have come across this “problem” quite a number of times where
the keywords are not broken apart properly.
Valuate.com does not have any means to change the keyword structure
but Estibot does. You just click on the highlighted “change” link after the keyword(s).
—
My experiment:
You know that Francois changed the valuation of banana (actually the keyword parsing was changed).
Go to Estibot.com.
Enter banana.com.
On the Appraisal page look for the line that says:
Keywords: banana [change}
Click the ‘change’ link.
On the drop down box that appears, enter ba na na
then click ‘Okay’.
You see the appraisal is still for the original $450.
ba na na .com $450
banana .com $1,910,000
Tric – you’re correct, I hadn’t seen the comments by Luc and Francois earlier because somehow they ended up in spam 😀
Eating a banana as we speak 😀
All the day out, I am just back.
I think what happened here was clear and well explained by Luc, Tricolorro, …
The glitch came from the fact Estibot.com let users change the word slicing at Estibot.com
Someone set that “ba na na” was the better slice of “banana”, which is absurd and should not be authorized.
In a private note Luc told me that they will improve Estibot.com so when people manually change the slicing an appraisal will be computed and if the new appraisal is lower than the previous then the new slice suggestion will not be approved.
Thanks Lucius for your post as it leaded to schedule a minor improvement that could be of high interest. Imagine if people start to putting fake slices on keywords just to manipulate appraisals!?
That’s great Francois 😀 Indeed, that banana was sliced badly 😀
Lucius “Guns” Fabrice says:
“Eating a banana as we speak”
Is it a BIG one? 🙂
*BURP*
In my opinion this is the appropriate domain name for adult domains ! (gay)
yeah cant pay much attention to valuations….who knows what mysterious sources lurk behind the algorithms ??
Makes me wonder – where my http://www.kela.in will reach one day 😛
Kela – Indian Word for banana. Indians love us some bananas!